The present invention generally relates to transaction processing, and more specifically to a method and system for providing risk information associated with payment card or product transactions.
There are many forms of payment cards or products, the most commonly known of which is the credit card. Other forms of payment cards or products include charge cards, debit cards, automated teller machine (ATM) cards, loyalty program cards, gift cards, and other identifiers used to receive or redeem value. In a typical payment card transaction, when a customer (e.g., an individual or business accountholder) presents a payment card to a merchant for payment, the merchant checks with the issuer (e.g., banks, credit unions, mortgage companies, and the like) of the payment card for authorization. In most instances, the issuer will first require the merchant to obtain evidence for authenticating the customer's identity at the time of the transaction, such as the customer's signature or customer's entry of a personal identification number (PIN) or password into a keypad. Authorization is then typically given by the issuer in the form of a code that indicates whether the authorization is given (i.e., whether the particular transaction is approved, declined, or referred).
There are different types of risks involved in authorizing use of a payment card. One well known type of risk is security risk, such as fraud. Security risk relates to illegitimate use of a payment card by an unauthorized person. Credit card fraud, for example, has continually been a persistent problem in the payment card industry. With the burgeoning growth of e-commerce and transactions conducted online, opportunities for payment card theft have become more readily available. As a result, online payment card fraud has also accordingly increased over the last few years. Existing industry solutions provide limited timely risk information to the transaction authorization process. Despite many prevention efforts, payment card fraud continues to account for annual losses in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars.
In addition to losses incurred due to payment card fraud, transactions lost due to false-positive declines (i.e., transactions that are incorrectly identified as fraudulent) also annually cost merchants and issuers hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.
Furthermore, existing industry solutions that combat payment card fraud tend to be account-and issuer-oriented. In other words, individual issuers may employ different solutions to detect fraudulent activities on their respective accounts and detection is at a single account level. As a result, payment card fraud that occurs across multiple accounts from multiple issuers often goes undetected. For example, it would be difficult for an individual issuer to determine that an usually high number of payment cards used at a particular merchant have been compromised and subject of fraud, since the fraud may only involve a small number of payment cards issued by that individual issuer.
Another type of risk that is associated with use of a payment card is credit risk, or the credit worthiness of the cardholder. While the payment card may be used by an authorized person, such as, the cardholder, the cardholder may not always be able to fulfill his/her incurred payment obligations. For example, a cardholder may run up a substantial amount of outstanding balance and then refuse or become unable to pay. Consequently, default or failure to pay also presents a significant problem to payment card issuers.
Moreover, risks associated with use of a payment card affect not only the cardholder and the payment card issuer. Other parties involved in the payment transaction, such as, the merchant and the acquirer (i.e., a financial institution that makes arrangements with merchants to accept credit card sales), are also affected as well. Depending on the business or payment arrangement, each party involved in the payment transaction may have to bear a portion of the loss.
Hence, it would be desirable to provide a method and system that is capable of providing a more robust transaction process in order to reduce payment card risk as well as improve the success rate of transaction verification.